With the complete ubiquity of digital computers today, it’s easy to forget that there are other, older technologies for synthesizing abstract images electronically. Some of the earliest abstract films were made in Germany in the ‘20s by a collaboration of Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling. When the DeStijl artist Van Doesberg visited the Richter-Eggeling studio in 1921 and saw the tedious animation process employed, he wrote, "…these carefully worked out drawings…proved to be insufficiently exact, in spite of their precision. The enormous enlargement by the lens…betrays each weakness of the human hand. And as it is not the hand anymore but the spirit which makes art, and, as the new spirit demands the greatest possible exactitude of expression, only the machine in her extreme perfection can realize the higher demands of the creating spirit. Thus, the need for these very rigorously precise drawings demand that…these drawings be mechanically produced...One can understand that abstract filmmaking is an area where mechanical means of drawing can render important services…"

		Thus, the need for these very rigorously precise drawings demand that…these drawings be mechanically produced...One can understand that abstract filmmaking is an area where mechanical means of drawing can render important services…" From the very beginning of abstract animation there was the realization that "the higher demands of the creating spirit" would lead to a new technology of image making –– not merely as a method for saving time or labor, but as a path to new aesthetic possibilities. Thirty years later that quest led to electronics and, in particular, the electronic analog computer. When controlling the electron beam of an oscilloscope (CRT), electronic signals become visible patterns. Manipulate the signal with the computer and you animate the corresponding forms on the screen.
1950-53 Oscillons by Ben Laposky.

In 1951 Norman McLaren made Around is Around, a 3D oscilloscope film. Mary Ellen Bute, a painter influenced by Fischinger’s visual music films, filmed oscilloscopes in the 1950s for what she called “Seeing Sound Films.” Title cards explain, “Actual pictures of sound captured on Cathode Ray Oscilloscope… Film Artist Mary Ellen Bute combines Science and Art to create Seeing Sound.” Her films showed at Radio City Music Hall through the 1950s as shorts before the first run features. Hirsh also made a number of oscilloscope films in the ‘50s.The oscilloscope films capture abstract visual patterns produced by an electrical signal. This conversion, this equivalence, makes possible the exploration of correspondence and synthesthesia. Thus, the use of the oscilloscope initiates a stage in the unfolding history of the larger project of visual music.

This tentative step in electronic imaging would be followed by artists at IBM, Bell Labs and many other advanced research centers. Hirsh, working in San Francisco and then Paris in the ‘50s, built his own optical printer and created layers of complex multi-plane animation using filmed oscilloscope images and oil wipes, set to jazz and ethnic music. Hirsh had taught painters Belson and Smith how to use the movie camera and optical printer, allowing them to appropriate these new tools for their aesthetic experimentation. The ‘40s and ‘50s saw many abstract filmmakers experimenting with 3D films. McLaren and Hirsh, Fischinger, Smith and Dwinell Grant all made work that explored this technical expansion of the cinema.
		1951 Come Closer 3D file by Hy Hirsh.

There is astrong relationship in the ‘50s between experimental cinema and advanced work in other arts, especially music and painting. Jazz provided a model for the filmmakers in terms of both its open, syncretic search for musical resources and also in its improvisational aspects. From the ‘40s to the ‘60s, the evolution of abstract filmmaking parallels the rise of abstraction in painting, with its search for a non-verbal, visceral and unmediated relation to the image.

		There is a dialectic between the development of an aesthetic space and the development of the supports, hardware, software, production and display, for advanced machine-based artwork. Each of the inventor-artists pushed the machines they’d appropriated or created as they could, in terms of striving for control. The technical limitations in the way a film like Lapis was made have been dissolved by new tools for image-making. But also, each film shares the marks of the technology, its powers and limitations. And these parameters become defining characteristics for certain phases in the evolution of image-making. Technology advances and supersedes its momentary limits, and some of the films’ characteristics become invisible to future generations.
1951 Around is Around by McLaren.